External Drive "Disk Erase Failed"

Hi All,
This is my first post to the supportcommunity and want to confirm i have searched around and while i found similar stories to my own, i did not find anything specifically helpful.
Recently i had the bright idea of moving my whole iTunes collection to a WD 500GB USB External Hard drive. The transfer was fine and iTunes was ok with the move of data. I Progressed and plugged the WD Drive in to my Airport Extreme and my Mac Book Pro recognised the drive no problems and again iTunes was able to connect to all my movies, songs etc etc.
I also tested this with my Apple TV 2 and found streaming a breeze in each room.
This morning however i noticed an error on my Apple TV 2 "Your Device does not have any movies" (or something similar), i checked my MBP and noticed the hard drive was no longer mounted nor available under the "Shared" drives list in Finder.
I tried the obvious steps first
Restart MBP
Restart APE
Restart MPB & APE after disconnecting WD Drive
Nothing above worked. I opened "Disk Utility", reconnected my WD drive directly and found my drive listed as expected. However if you see the image attached to this post you will see while my MBP recognises the drive, it does not recognise the partition created only a few days ago called "iTunes". Also the Verify Disk & Repair Disk options are not available which is a real bummer.
Finally i tried connecting the drive to a spare windows xp laptop i have, windows will start to install the device drivers which are the usual generic type and confirm the installation was complete, however My Computer does not show any drives attached.
I know i "Erased" the drive before moving my data in "Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and i did not set any security options.
I can understand Windows not recognising the drive, of course it is not NTFS or FAT32. But for my MBP to see the drive in Disk Utility and not show the partition is strange and frankly worrying.
Litterally every song, movie and TV series i ever purchased via iTunes is on that drive.
My iPhone has my music but im struggling to get that off the phone and back to my MPB, my iPad has a couple of movies but not all.
Finally i fogot to mention i tried to use disk warrior however this didnt recognise any drives other than my MAC HD.
Any help would be amazing thank you very much.

Hi guys,
Wondering if you can help me out...
I made a time machine copy on a 500gb external hard drive of my 13" MBP with a HDD currently in it.
Then took my 500gb SSD from an old 15" MBP, removed the HDD and put it in my 13" MBP.
Opened up 13" MBP in restore mode. Chose restore from time machine back up.
Choose the time machine external drive as source. Then chose the SSD drive to restore to.
Said it was erasing the drive... Asked for a password...
I typed in my usual password. It then said the SSD drive couldn't be erased.
Took the SSD out and put the original HDD back in.
Plugged the SSD into a firewire 800 caddy to try erase it in disk utility as an external.
This drive will show up in disk utility but the erase option isn't available.
I can repair the disk but it says the disk is perfectly fine.
I can click on the partition option but everything is greyed out and I can't partition it at all.
This drive will now no longer show up on the desktop or finder.
This is driving me crazy!
Just want to erase the SSD, use time machine to restore onto it and get busy.
Please help!
Thanks,
Chris

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